Anita Sarkeesian (/sɑːrˈkiːziən/; born 1983) is a Canadian-American feminist media critic, blogger, and public speaker. She is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture. She has received particular attention for her video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which examines tropes in the depiction of female video game characters.

In 2012, Sarkeesian was targeted by an online harassment campaign following her launch of a Kickstarter project to fund the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series. Supporters donated almost $160,000 to the project, far beyond the $6,000 she had sought. The situation was covered extensively in the media, placing Sarkeesian at the center of discussions about misogyny in video game culture and online harassment. She has spoken to TEDxWomen, XOXO Festival, and the United Nations' Broadband Working Group on Gender, and appeared on The Colbert Report discussing her experiences of harassment and the challenge of attempting to improve gender inclusivity in gaming culture and the media.

Feminist Frequency

Sarkeesian launched her website Feminist Frequency in 2009, while a student at York University. She created the site in an effort to create accessible feminist media criticism.[7][8] Videos created for the site analyzed social and cultural gender structure and popular culture from a feminist standpoint, such as applying the Bechdel test to pictures nominated for a 2011 Academy Award and highlighting Lego's role in reinforcing cultural norms.[9][10]

In 2011, Sarkeesian co-authored the essay "Buffy vs. Bella: The Re-Emergence of the Archetypal Feminine in Vampire Stories" for the anthology Fanpires: Audience Consumption of the Modern Vampire.[13] She spoke at conferences and workshops about media criticism and video blogging, and was interviewed by UK Sunday newspaper The Observer in March 2012 about modern media culture, stating: "I think to the extent that it could be creating authentic, human female characters, it is a push towards a more feminist media."[14]

In March 2012, Sarkeesian and her blog were listed in the journal Feminist Collections's quarterly column on "E-Sources on Women & Gender".[15] Her blog has been utilized as material for university-level women's studies courses, and she has spoken at universities on the topic of female characters in pop culture.[16]

Sarkeesian was inspired to start a video series on female representation in video games after she was invited to speak to developers at Bungie.[7] On May 17, 2012, she began a Kickstarter campaign to fund a series of short videos that would examine gender tropes in video games that was featured as a campaign of note on the official Kickstarter blog.[17] The threats and harassment she received in response generated widespread media attention, and resulted in her ultimately far exceeding her funding goal of $6,000.[18] The final amount raised was $158,922 from 6,968 backers.[19]

Title card used in the Tropes vs Women videos

Sarkeesian initially planned to release the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series in 2012, but pushed it back explaining that the additional funding allowed her to expand the scope and scale of the project. The first video in the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series was released on March 7, 2013.[20]

The first three videos discuss examples of the "Damsels in Distress" trope, in which passive and often helpless female characters must be rescued by the male hero.[8][12] Chris Suellentrop of The New York Times referred to the first four videos of the series as "essential viewing for anyone interested in video games", and cites it as the reason why he asked Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto about the themes of damsels present in his games, to which he responded "I haven't given it a lot of deep thought over the years".[21]

In January 2015, as part of a $300 million effort to increase diversity and inclusivity in the technology sphere, Intel announced it would partner with Feminist Frequency and other groups to help promote increased career opportunities, engagement and positive representation for women and minorities in technology and gaming.[22][23]

On January 23, 2015, Feminist Frequency issued its first annual report and announced they were planning two new video series tackling the "positive" portrayal of women in video games, as well as the "portrayal of masculine identities in games".[24][25]

On March 8, 2016, Feminist Frequency launched a crowdfunding campaign for an animated video series called Ordinary Women. The planned 5-episode series will explore the lives of historical women such as Ida B. Wells and Emma Goldman.[26]

In March 2016, Feminist Frequency began a formal partnership with the Crash Override Network, agreeing to serve as its fiscal sponsor.[27] Crash Override is a support group for victims of large scale online abuse formed by game developers Zoë Quinn and Alex Lifschitz in the wake of the Gamergate controversy.

The Tropes vs Women project triggered a campaign of sexist harassment against Sarkeesian that included rape and death threats, hacking of her webpages and social media, and doxing. Attackers posted disparaging comments online, vandalized Sarkeesian's article on Wikipedia with racial slurs and sexual images, and sent Sarkeesian drawings of herself being raped by video game characters.[28][29][30][31][32][33]

Sarkeesian's elevated profile led to speaking engagements on sexual harassment and online communities at the TEDxWomen conference and several universities.[42][43][44][45][46]

In March 2014, Sarkeesian was scheduled to speak and receive an award at the 2014 Game Developers Choice Awards. The organizers later revealed that they had received an anonymous bomb threat and that San Francisco police had swept the Moscone Center hall before the event proceeded.[47]

In August 2014, Feminist Frequency issued a new Tropes vs Women in Games episode. This coincided with the ongoing harassment of Zoë Quinn as part of the Gamergate controversy. The increased volume and specificity of the harassment (including death threats) prompted Sarkeesian to leave her home. San Francisco Police confirmed that they had passed the case file to the FBI for investigation.[48][49]

On October 14, 2014, Sarkeesian and Utah State University received terrorist threats pertaining to her planned lecture at the university the following day. The threats, one of which was issued by a person who claimed to be affiliated with Gamergate,[50] specifically cited the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as inspiration. The university and police did not believe the threats were credible inasmuch as they were consistent with others Sarkeesian had received, but scheduled enhanced security measures nonetheless. Sarkeesian canceled the event, however, feeling the planned security measures were insufficient given that the university could not prohibit handguns in the venue per Utah state law.[51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]

In an August 2015 interview with The Guardian, Sarkeesian remarked of dealing with the pervasive harassment (her "new normal") that older mentors and feminists told her "We were dealing with that, but they were throwing rocks at us".[59]

The media scholar Soraya Murray describes the attack as a "watershed moment" in the "culture war" being fought over representations of women and minorities in video games.[18]

While noting that the support Sarkeesian has received "stands at a counter" to the harassment, Sal Humphreys and Karen Orr Vered suggest that ultimately the campaign may serve to discourage other women from following Sarkeesian's lead for fear of being subjected to similar attacks.[62]

Speaking at the XOXO Festival in September 2014, Sarkeesian described the allegation that she and other women fabricated harassment as itself being a form of harassment. "Harassment is the background radiation of my life," she later remarked in a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story on her work and the video game industry.[63][64]

The Utah State University threats resulted in public attention to misogynistic and violent harassment on the Internet, along with the propriety of concealed weapons on university campuses. In an editorial, The Salt Lake Tribune wrote that the threats "would seem to support Sarkeesian's point about a link between some video games and violent attitudes toward females" and called on the state to allow universities "to ban firearms from venues where they are not just inappropriate, but destructive of the mission of an institution of higher learning."[52][65][66][67][68]

On October 29, 2014, Sarkeesian was interviewed on The Colbert Report where she discussed the harassment she suffered at the hands of GamerGate and her views on making video games more inclusive. She told Colbert that video games often portray women in a manner which "reinforces the cultural myth that women are sexual objects" and that her goal is not to censor video games, but to raise awareness of how women can be portrayed in more realistic, less stereotypical ways.[69][70][71]

The harassment of Sarkeesian and other women in gaming was featured in the edition of January 14, 2015 of Nightline. When asked by ABC News why there was so much anger, she responded "I think it comes from this idea that gaming is a male-dominated space, and that games are for men by men... it's a very misogynist backlash".[72] She appears in the 2015 documentary GTFO.[73]

Awards and nominations

Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency blog was highlighted by Feminist Collections and Media Report to Women.[15][75] In 2012 Gamasutra considered the harassment and success of Feminist Frequency a catalyst that led to new attention on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the gaming culture and industry. They named this call for inclusion one of the "5 trends that defined the game industry in 2012".[60][76] In 2013, Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast named Sarkeesian one of their "125 Women of Impact".[77][78] She also received an Honorary Award at the 2013 National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers (NAVGTR) Awards for her "Damsel in Distress" videos.[79]

In 2014, Sarkeesian received the Ambassador Award at the 14th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards for her work on the representation of women in video games, becoming the first woman to receive the award.[80][81] She was also nominated for the Ambassador Award at Microsoft's 2014 Women in Gaming Awards for her work.[82][83]

After the Utah State University death threats, Rolling Stone called her "pop culture's most valuable critic," saying that "the backlash has only made her point for her: Gaming has a problem".[84] In December 2014, The Verge named her as one of "the 50 most important people at the intersection of technology, art, science, and culture".[85] In March 2015, Time magazine included Sarkeesian in its list of the thirty "Most Influential People on the Internet",[86] and in April of that year, chose her for the Time 100, the magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.[87] In May 2015, Cosmopolitan included her in its list of the "50 Most Fascinating People on the Internet".[3]

Bibliography

The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture (October 2015, Seven Stories Press)[88]

History vs Women: The Defiant Lives Thay They Don't Want You to Know (co-written with Ebony Adams, October 2018 Macmillan Publishing)

^Heron, Michael James; Belford, Pauline; Goker, Ayse (2014). "Sexism in the circuitry". ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society. 44 (4): 18–29. doi:10.1145/2695577.2695582. ISSN0095-2737. The simple launching of this project resulted in a staggering and continuing campaign of harassment, defamation and real life threats spectacularly out of proportion to the triggering incident.